Nr.

47 December 2015

ISSN 1439-2011

Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping

Documentation of a symposium held in Bonn,
10th of October 2015

Herausgeber:
Bund fr Soziale Verteidigung e.V.

Editor:
Bund fr Soziale Verteidigung (Federation for Social Defence)
Schwarzer Weg 8
32423 Minden, Germany
Hintergrund- und Diskussionspapier Nr. 47
December 2015
ISSN 1439-2011
3,- Euro

Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 5
1. A Determination to Protect: The State of the Art ................................................................. 6
What is unarmed civilian peacekeeping? ............................................................................. 6
Comparing approaches to UCP .......................................................................................... 7
How do we know UCP works? ........................................................................................... 9
So where is the research at the moment? ......................................................................... 10
Linking UCP to other discourses........................................................................................ 10
The local ...................................................................................................................... 11
Is UCP a paradigm shift? .................................................................................................. 12
References ....................................................................................................................... 13
2. Panel: Experiences with Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping .................................................... 15
Oliver Knabe: ................................................................................................................... 15
Rolf Carrire: ................................................................................................................... 16
Mel Duncan: .................................................................................................................... 17
Discussion on the panel.................................................................................................... 20
Input and questions from the audience ............................................................................. 22
3. Panel: Glass Ceilings. On the Political Acceptance of the Concept ...................................... 25
Alessandro Rossi: ............................................................................................................. 25
Mel Duncan: .................................................................................................................... 28
Rolf Carrire: ................................................................................................................... 30
Oliver Knabe: ................................................................................................................... 32
4. Brainstorming by Participants: What Could be Done in Germany? ..................................... 34
5. Outlook ........................................................................................................................... 35

Acknowledgments
We thank everyone who helped to realize this symposium which was held in Bonn, Germany, on
the 10th of October 2015, and its documentation. These are the speakers, some of whom travelled a long way to come to Bonn - Mel Duncan from Minneapolis just returning from Lebanon,
Rolf Carrire from Genf, Alessandro Rossi from Brussels, Rachel Julian from Leeds and Oliver
Knabe from Cologne. Victoria Kropp and Saskia Bredemeier are the two interns who transcribed
and translated the two panels. Pia Ucar helped with proof-reading the translations. Sine Kranich
did the final proof-reading and managed the organisation and the finances. Martin Arnold helped
with the filming of the event.
And last not least we thank the two organisations that helped to fund the symposium the Rosa
Luxemburg Foundation and Bread for the World- Protestant Development Services.
For the Federation for Social Defence:
Christine Schweitzer

1. Introduction
The Federation for Social Defence (Bund fr Soziale Verteidigung - BSV, www.sozialeverteidigung.de) together with the Institute for Peace Work and Nonviolent Conflict Transformation (www.ifgk.de) organised a symposium on Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping / Protection
(UCP) on the 10th of October 2015 in Bonn. The symposium has been an important element of
the campaign on UCP that the BSV is undertaking in order to familiarize politics and peace
movement with this approach. We have been able to win international experts to speak at the
conference, and would like to present the interesting contributions to a wider audience through
this documentation.
The symposium took place at a time when the news knew only one headline the thousands of
refugees coming to Germany. In the meanwhile, there are also other topics on the public agenda,
though our governments still have to find a convincing strategy how to respond to the obvious
failure of the regulations of Schengen and Dublin. Still people from crisis areas are coming to Europe seeking protection. They come because the world community has not found a concept how
to protect civilian population in armed conflict so that people do not need to flee.
At the same time it is obvious that military interventions do not lead to peace but only to new
conflicts, and cause new causes for people to be displaced. Recently Kundus in Afghanistan the
symbol for German military engagement in Afghanistan was for a short-time re-occupied by
Taliban troops. This shows how little the long military presence and the fight against Islamists contributed to stability in that country.
The question which alternatives there may be to military interventions is a very urgent one. Civil
alternatives how to protect civilian population are comparatively unknown but they exist. Every
day they make the life of people in certain regions more secure and can help to protect people
from death. But civilian peacekeeping is still miles away from being able to prevent a war. The
concept needs much more attention, and much more resources and capacities. We know that unarmed civilian protection works, but yet have to learn which exactly the conditions for UCP are in
order to be successful. How can we become more effective, and how can we convince politics
and the wider public to believe in the possibilities of unarmed protection?
At the symposium we have been searching for answers to these questions and found some,
though at the same time many new questions arose. In the audience there have been German as
well as surprisingly many international peace activists and researchers, as well as some representatives of political parties. We hope that the readers of this documentation will also find much food
for thought here!

Outi Arajrvi ist Co-Chair of the Federation for Social Defence and member of the international
board of Nonviolent Peaceforce.

2. A Determination to Protect: The State of the Art

Rachel Julian

Unarmed, nonviolent peacekeeping is both a practical

and compassionate response to suffering and violence
and a challenge to what seems an overwhelming
worldview, that violence solves problems. In this talk I am
going to go through some introduction and overview of
Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping (UCP), what we do and
don't know, who and where, detail some of the ways
in which research is being focused at the moment to relate the wealth of experience to different
ways of thinking and developing UCP into a distinct field, and finally why this is important.
I have an overall question to consider when we think about the scale, scope and development of
unarmed peacekeeping. Are we looking at a paradigm shift? Is UCP a concept, approach, action
and activity which is a radical challenge to current thinking on how we think about people living
with violence and how we respond to violent conflict? Are we tinkering at the edges, playing with
words, or are we creating something new? I'll come back to this below.
What is unarmed civilian peacekeeping?
At its core, unarmed civilian peacekeeping (UCP) is unarmed civilians using nonviolence, care,
compassion and commitment to protect other civilians and prevent violence in communities. It is
about taking action.
It can be accompanying someone or an organisation to do something where they might be
threatened with violence, it can be patrolling, visiting and monitoring areas, being visible as
someone who is not a threat, is not one of the armed actors, and is someone who will listen and
be impartial. It is about building relationships, rebuilding connections and communication
between those who could work to reduce violence. In every place where it is used around the
world it is always context specific, it is adapted and developed by the people who work on the
ground.
Two stories illustrate this.
1. Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) provides unarmed civilian peacekeepers. In mid 2014, women living
in the Benitu Protection of Civilians area in South Sudan alerted the team living there that women
were being raped and sometimes gang-raped by soldiers when they went out to gather firewood
and water. The women reported that sometimes the soldiers would describe the assaults to be
part of their job. Often older women took on these chores to protect the younger ones, and
decrease the likelihood of attack. Women had to choose between their personal safety and
providing for their families basic needs. NP began accompanying the women when they left the
camp, sending two or more trained civilian protectors along with them. In the year after this
accompaniment was offered no woman was attacked when accompanied.
Instead, the soldiers looked the other way. In the past year NP has provided over 1,000
accompaniments for vulnerable people, primarily women.
2. In the Philippines, NP was part of the International Monitoring Team that monitors peace
processes and ceasefire agreements between the national government and the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front. On 7 April 2011, a sudden firefight erupted in one of the most isolated and
disputed locations of western Mindanao. Some 400 armed men from law enforcement agencies

surrounded an island with military boats and troops in an operation aimed at securing the arrest
of a criminal group. A firefight ensued lasting four and a half hours, in which several loud
explosions were heard, displacing the 4000 civilians who lived on the island. Thirteen houses were
burned and nine suspected criminals were killed. On the request of local stakeholders,
NPs Quick Response Team, comprised of both international and national protection monitors,
embarked upon a three-day verification mission. The prompt intervention of NP helped to ensure
the immediate and safe return of the 4000 frightened civilians to their homes.
Before NPs presence, they were reluctant to do so for fear of further attacks. NPs presence also
helped to ensure the incident was dealt with immediately and was afforded proper attention by
higher authorities, one result was compensation to the families whose houses had been burned.
(NP 2015)
Comparing approaches to UCP
There are hundreds of people doing this work, and although some are in international
organisations like OSCE, I am focusing on the NGOs and civil society doing this work because this
is under-researched and under-theorised and it is, I believe, where most innovation is taking place.
In a survey for the special issue on UCP that Christine Schweitzer and I did for the journal Peace
Review this year we looked at the range of INGOs doing work described as unarmed
peacekeeping to see where there is some similarity. We need to be clear that while we talk about
unarmed peacekeeping there is no agreement on terms we should use to describe the work, but
there is a consensus on values that underpin the work.
We looked at the public ways in which nine organisations implementing UCP who work
worldwide and all nine organisations are clear they are nonviolent in principle, mandate and
implementation.
The nine organisations are:
Peace Brigades International (PBI) who have been working in this field for 30 years. Their largest project is in Colombia. www.peacebrigades.org
Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) has been working for 12 years and their largest projects are in
Mindanao (Philippines) and in South Sudan. www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org
Meta Peace Team (MPT) previously known as Michigan Peace Team, has been working for 16
years. They now work in the West Bank, Palestine/Israel. www.metapeaceteam.org
Witness for Peace (WfP) started in 1983/84 by accompanying people in Nicaragua and advocating back home against the US support for the (right-wing) guerilla fighting the new Nicaraguan
government. WfP now works across Latin America. www.witnessforpeace.org
Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) has been working in
Israel and Palestine since 2002 and volunteers stay for a few months. http://eappi.org/en
Operation Dove started in 1995 work in Israel and Palestine, Albania and Colombia.
www.operationdove.org
Fellowship of Reconciliation USA (FoRUSA) has been accompanying peace communities in
Colombia since 2002. http://forusa.org/content/colombia-peace-update
Swedish FoR (SweFOR) have peace observers in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico.
http://krf.se/en/
Christian Peacemakers Team (CPT) work in six projects and have both long term and short term
corps. www.cpt.org
They are also working with local people, Most (including Peace Brigades International-PBI,
Nonviolent Peaceforce-NP, Meta Peace Team -MPT, and Christian Peacemaker Teams-CPT) said
7

they were invited by local people, and Operation Dove, MPT, NP and PBI explicitly said that they
lived and worked with the people they protect. (Schweitzer and Julian 2015)
This local engagement is about reducing violence. Meta Peace Team described their work as
follows:
Unlike conflict resolution/transformation, mediation or dialogue work, we do not seek to

mediate or resolve the underlying conflict directly, or to broker 'peace talks'although we may
act to support one or all of these actions.
Instead, our Teams are focused on the front-line work of reducing violence and the threat of
violence, in order to create some safe(r) space for everyone involved. Creating this space can then
allow the parties themselves to determine the means and the terms of transforming/resolving the
conflict. (www.metapeaceteam.org)
And PBI say:
We believe that lasting transformation of conflicts cannot be imposed from outside, but must be

based on the capacity and desires of local people. Therefore we do not take part in the work of
the organisations we accompany. Rather our role is to open political space and provide moral
support for local activists to carry out their work without fear of repression.
(http://www.peacebrigades.org/about-pbi/ accessed on March 6th 2014)
Christine Schweitzer has shown how the values of impartiality and non-partisanship relate to UCP
in practice:

Schweitzer, C. (2010)

In practice, non-interference and non-partisanship were explicit values in NP, PBI and Ecumenical
Accompaniment Project in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI).
There is significant debate on the role of impartiality and what it means in practice, because all

the NGOs operating explained, in their aim, vision or activity description that they protect people
and their human rights, and some, including Witness for Peace -WfP, CPT, Swedish Fellowship of
Reconciliation-SweFOR and Operation Dove include direct action and campaigning to support
people experiencing oppression or change policies. (Julian and Schweitzer 2015)

Unarmed peacekeepers live and work with the people they are protecting (not in military
barracks) which means they learn about existing community mechanisms and makes them
accessible and able to provide a safe space in which new committees, training or meetings can
take place.
Establishing unarmed peacekeeping means being visible, known to and by all actors and being
clear that the purpose is to stop threats of violence, not trying to resolve the conflict. By building
trust they enable new communication between actors and rebuilding relationships.
UCP is separate to other actors because it does not bring humanitarian aid nor conflict resolution

solutions. By maintaining the focus on violence, asking for help from unarmed civilian
peacekeepers isn't related to getting housing or aid, but it is about focusing on security, safety
and the creation of mechanisms which will prevent children being abducted, will prevent
retaliation attacks by controlling rumors, will ensure community leaders talk to each other to send
out a message of peace, or because they request accompaniment to report human rights
abuses." (Schweitzer and Julian 2015)
These common values help us determine why and what the field of unarmed peacekeeping
contributes, but what about they in which we understand the impact it is. How do we know it
works?
How do we know UCP works?
What do we know, from the evaluations, case studies, reports from field teams and interviews
with people in the teams and communities, about the impact that UCP has?
We know that lives are saved, communities able to stay at home rather than be displaced, and
that peace or human rights work made more possible, involve more people and in a wider area.
The work of living with and in affected communities, supports the re-establishment of
relationships and communication across divided communities.
We know that the attitudes and behaviour of armed actors is changed because they are
presented with an alternative e.g. military leaders in Mindanao explaining how important
International Civilian Peacekeepers (ICPs) were in maintaining the ceasefire, and threats of death
not being carried out against human rights defenders whilst they are accompanied.
We know that this work challenges a widespread assumption that violence will only yield to
violence because it demonstrates that violence and threats of violence can be tackled by unarmed
trained civilians. This doesnt mean that UCP will work everywhere. As with all peacekeeping, it
works because the armed actors acknowledge the presence of the peacekeepers and, to a certain
extent, care about the impact of their actions. Military peacekeeping faces the same challenge.
Armed actors who do not care who they kill will not yield to armed or unarmed peacekeepers.
We are asked to prove that UCP works, and we need to ask military peacekeeping to prove that it
works.
We are seeking to prove UCP works. The key question 'but how do you know it works?'
motivated me to do my PhD research and understand who wants to know and what they are
expecting to hear. It is not difficult to show the impact of UCP in saving lives (Julian and Furnari
2014) and improving communication and relationships, but it is harder to prove that violence
didn't happen, and harder still to prove that the violence didn't happen because UCP was in
place.
Furnari and Julian (2014), in a meta-analysis of three Nonviolent Peaceforce evaluations,
summarized impact as,
there is significant evidence that UCP projects impact the safety of civilians and the capacity for

civilians to be politically active, or even engage in everyday activities that might be risky otherwise.
Thus another set of lessons regards the efficacy of nonviolent intervention. Repeatedly evaluations
and our own research suggest that the principle of being nonviolent is key to developing
relationships, understanding the context, and even UCPs own safety. Being actively nonpartisan,
9

that is acting in ways that are clearly not aligned with one armed group or the other, but which is
aligned with civilian protection, is frequently mentioned as another essential component of
effectiveness. A third frequently mentioned practice which was seen to contribute to both
immediate effects and long term impacts, is the primacy of local actors. (Furnari and Julian 2014)
It is lastly hard to prove because UCP doesn't easily fit a programme of poverty reduction or
security improvement or conflict resolution So we don't fit the predetermined ideas of those
we seek to convince - but eventually we will!
So where is the research at the moment?
It is clear we do not have an agreed field of study, we are still understanding and defining it. It
requires more interdisciplinary research teams and thinking, and both placing UCP in existing
debates, but also creating new understanding.
In understanding how it works in relation to theory and applying understanding from other fields:
The book 'Unarmed Bodyguards' (Mahony and Eguren 1997) has given us a solid theoretical
approach to understanding how armed actors are deterred through accompaniment, Patrick Coy
has worked on how the use of privilege fits in with deterring attacks (Coy 2012), Christine
Schweitzer has placed UCP within its historical roots and current peace approaches including
Responsibility to Protect (Schweitzer 2010). Ellen Furnari interviewed peacekeepers and found out
that most of them, whether armed or not, believe the building of relationships is key to success in
peacekeeping (Furnari 2012). Enrique Eguren is exploring why the protection of network nodes is
so crucial (Eguren 2015). A team has worked with UNITAR to produce the first course on UCP
setting out practical and theoretical, debated and contested, approaches. (UNITAR 2015)
Linking UCP to other discourses
Acknowledging this new and evolving thinking as underpinning our understanding, I want to
focus on how UCP is relating to several factors in practice, policy and politics. They are,

Peacekeeping theory

Links to peacebuilding

The importance of 'the local'

Militarism.
Through these we can see how UCP impacts on current thinking and practice in relation to
violence reduction.
Peacekeeping doesnt have a universally accepted definition but let us start with the way in
which Galtung (1976) described a triad of peacebuilding, peacemaking and peacekeeping. In this
construction, peacekeeping is the prevention and reduction of violence, sometimes associated
with a ceasefire or peace agreement, and we need to start thinking of this role of peacekeeping
as different to the way in which is delivered or achieved, which most people assume means a
military force. What emerges, when you look at the activities of peacekeepers as described on the
UN DPKO website and those from UCP, is that many of the activities are the same: relationship
building, presence, patrolling, monitoring. What is surprising should not be that civilians CAN do
this work, but rather why has nobody seen that civilians can do this work, and that weapons are
not required.
It is true that this is challenging a widely accepted view that if you have violence you need
soldiers. We are asking people to use a moral imagination to think differently about violence and
the way in which we do peacekeeping.
Peacekeeping can be changed by incorporating the principles of unarmed peacekeeping, but so
can peacebuilding be improved. Furnari, Oldenhuis and Julian argue that UCP supports
peacebuilding better than military peacekeeping in the following ways:

10

"Peacekeeping (armed and unarmed) is an essential link between peacemaking and

peacebuilding as it creates the security and stability needed to implement peace agreements,
address root causes, and rebuild relations = peacekeeping is relevant for peacebuilding.
Lack of or insufficient peacekeeping may hamper or stall peacebuilding and development efforts
= effective and timely peacebuilding depends to some extent on effective peacekeeping.
Protection has been under-emphasized within the practice of peacebuilding, while unarmed or
nonviolent methods have been under-emphasized within the practice of peacekeeping = there is a
need for more synergy between peacekeeping and peacebuilding.
Peacebuilding and peacekeeping are separate practices in theory and to some extent in practice
for foreign experts, however the reality on the ground is more complex or fluid. The practice of
providing protection, security, and conflict resolution often occurs simultaneously or overlaps (e.g.
in order to negotiate about security, relations need to be build). The local actors involved in these
practices are often the same people, who dont differentiate their actions as peacemaking or
peacebuilding (unlike foreign experts) = peacebuilding is already practiced by local actors at the
crisis/peacekeeping (and peace making) stage even though it may not be considered
peacebuilding and external peacebuilding efforts may not yet be launched.
UCP recognizes this reality and plays a role in protecting and nurturing these local peacebuilding
efforts and local peacebuilders in the bud. It doesnt simply create security and when the
situation is deemed stable hands over the keys to the peacebuilders. Its approach to security and
protection is in a way peacebuilding. It can be used before, during and after a violent situation,
and tailor its peacekeeping interventions to the context and needs of the people = UCP is an ideal
kind of peacekeeping from a peacebuilding perspective." (Furnari, Oldenhuis and Julian 2014)
Being able to protect civilians without the use of violence, force, or the military, demonstrates
that peace is possible and helps break the cycle of violence. If we consider a model in which
successful peacekeeping leads easily into long term peacebuilding (and we know that
peacebuilding requires the rebuilding of relationships and ways of resolving conflict without
violence), then a peacekeeping method which encompasses and models these practices and
values is already helping to establish ways of working together for a time when the violence has
reduced. (Julian and Schweitzer 2015)

The local
The next great contribution of UCP in the prevention of violence is to the local. The importance
of the local is still being developed (Reich 2006, Paffenholz 2014), but is broadly accepted as
vital in creating long-term sustainable peace. Military peacekeeping cant work at the local level in
this way, of empowering local people, giving them ownership over their own protection and
violence prevention work, but local is necessary for transformative change.
UCP is rooted in the local by virtue of both the action of living and working in the community,
by leaning into violence and being led by local concernsand also by being based on nonviolence
theory. Nonviolence is about empowering and enabling the local, led by the local. Civil resistance,
nonviolent conflict resolution and restorative justice are all nonviolent approaches in which the
focus is on the peoplethose affected, and believing that solutions and the future are rooted in
the local, the people.
But the local is contested. It matters that we understand whos voices are included, how their
knowledge is used and how UCP manages the conflicting needs and interests within them.
The work we know about and currently study is that supported by INGOs, still based on western
ideas of conflict analysis, still tied into the global structures of the liberal peace. A critique of the
liberal peace sees it as a hegemonic imposition of western systems of justice and democracy that
does not seek to resolve root causes of the violence or the needs of diverse and divided
communities.

11

Military peacekeeping began as a way of dealing with

conflicts between states, recognizing the primacy of the
state and intervention in interstate violence, and it has
evolved into Post-Westphalian, or the liberal peace, in
which peacekeepers work on human rights, security
sector reform, establishing democratic systems and the
rule of law. These strategies focus on creating a liberal
democracy rather than responding to local
communities and cultures, building on local capacities
and meeting local needs. If peace requires the inclusion
of the local, and military peacekeeping cannot engage
with the local, then UCP provides a way in which the
prevention of violence work can cross that gap and
enable a smoother transition to peacebuilding.
Finally there is the role of UCP in challenging
militarism. Peacekeeping has been successfully
colonised by the military, so that no dissent,
from civil society or academia, is visible, to the
extent that in thinking about the challenges
faced by UN peacekeeping the debate focuses
on an alternative to UN peacekeeping (Bellamy
and Williams 2010) is not civilian, but armed
forces under the African Union, or the use of
private military companies.
It cannot possibly be true that peacekeeping is
the only part of peace work which can only be
done by the military not when we know that
the activities are often the same and not when
we understand the need to break the cycle of
violence and engage with the local.
One way of thinking about this is Diana
Francis's concept of pacification and
Peacebuilding (Francis 2010). If we firmly want
to be on the side of Peacebuilding, then we
must reduce the militarised response to
Francis (2010)
violence, and UCP contributes to this.
Whilst at a daily level UCP saves lives, at a systemic level UCP is a challenge to militarism a
challenge to the belief that the military are the only, or the best at preventing and reducing
violence. It is a challenge to the assertion that the military can bring peace.
It is true that to work in UCP you do not have to be a pacifist, but understand that nonviolence is
powerful and effective. Organisations running the projects can maintain their focus on being
effective and building capacity, -but somewhere we must be clear that supporting UCP is a
challenge to the almost universal belief that you need the military to prevent and reduce violence.
An act of resistance as well as an act of compassion.
Is UCP a paradigm shift?
I ask this because whenever I present the concept, case studies and implications to a new
audience there are those who welcome the new thinking - and now UCP researchers have been
asked to write a paradigm shifting article for international academic journal on peacekeeping,
outlining- that nonviolent unarmed peacekeeping is an approach which has not been visible,
discussed, envisaged or imagined.
12

For academics and policy makers, on a theoretical level in peacekeeping UCP is a paradigm shift, it
challenges the fundamental assumption that if there is violence you need armed soldiers to
prevent and reduce it. Mindanao has some of the best anecdotal examples of military leaders
understanding the importance of the unarmed civilian peacekeepers on the ground and in the
ceasefire agreement, that with the involvement of UCP this ceasefire is different. This suggests
that UCP can be transformative and paradigm shifting on the ground.
What is currently required is a systematic study of the available evidence for effectiveness and
funding is currently being sought, a global network of experts and a community who can
envisage and enable the growth of UCP.
References
Bellamy, A and Williams, P. (2010) Understanding Peacekeeping. Polity
Carriere, Rolf (2010) The World Needs Another Peacekeeping, in Schweitzer, Christine (Ed.) (2010) Civilian
Peacekeeping A Barely Tapped Ressource. Arbeitspapier Nr. 23, Institute for Peace Work and Nonviolent
Conflict Transformation
Chenoweth, Erika and Cunningham, Kathleen Gallagher (2011) Understanding Nonviolent Resistance,
Special Issue of the Journal of Peace Research, Vol 50 No 3, May 2013
Chenoweth, Erika and Stephan, Maria J. (2011) Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of
Nonviolent Conflict, Columbia University Press
Coy, Patrick (2012) The Privilege Problematic in International Nonviolent Accompaniments Early Decades:
Peace Brigades International Confronts the Use of Racism, The Journal of Religion, Conflict and Peace
Featherstone, A. Betts (1994) Towards a Theory of United Nations Peacekeeping. Palgrave.
Francis, Diana (2010) Pacification and Peacebuilding. Pluto Press.
Francis, Diana (2013) Making Peace Global. Peace Review Vol 25. No.1
Furnari, Ellen (2012) Its about relationships more than weapons: front line peacekeepers define effective
peacekeeping. Paper presented at the International Peace Research Association, Tsu City Japan.
Furnari, Ellen (2014) Understanding effectiveness in peacekeeping operations: Exploring the perspectives of
frontline peacekeepers (Thesis Doctor of Philosophy), University of Otago, Dunedin NZ.
(http://hdl.handle.net/10523/4765)
Furnari, Ellen, Oldenhuis, H. and Julian, Rachel (2015) Securing Space for Local Peacebuilding accepted for
publication in Peacebuilding.
Galtung, Johan (1976) Three approaches to peace.peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding. In:
Peace, War and Defence Essays in Peace Research Vol II. Hrsg. Galtung, Johan. Copenhagen:Christian
Ejlers: 282-304
Julian, Rachel (2010) Peacekeeping with Nonviolence: Protection strategies for Sustainable Peace in
Schweitzer, Christine (Ed.) (2010) Civilian Peacekeeping A Barely Tapped Resource. Arbeitspapier Nr. 23,
Institute for Peace Work and Nonviolent Conflict Transformation
Julian, Rachel (2012) Demonstrating results in locally owned conflict transformation. PhD thesis.
Julian, Rachel (2015) Peacekeeping Vision: Unarmed Nonviolent Peacekeeping. Leeds Beckett University.
Julian, Rachel and Schweitzer, Christine (2015) The Origins and Development of Unarmed Civilian
Peacekeeping. Peace Review. Volume 27, Issue 1, 2015, pages 1- 8
Lederach, John Paul (1997), Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, United States
Institute of Peace Press, Washington, DC
Mahony, Liam and Eguren, Luis Enrique (1997) Unarmed Bodyguards. International Accompaniment for the
Protection of Human Rights. West Hartford:Kumarian Press
MCDC (2014) Understand to Prevent: The military contribution to the prevention of violent conflict. MCDC.
NP (2015) UCP Case Studies available online
http://www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/images/publications/UCP_Case_Studies_10July15.pdf cited in Julian
2015

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Paffenholz, T. (2014) International Peacebuilding Goes Local: Analysing Lederachs Conflict Transformation
Theory and its Ambivalent Encounter with 20 years of Practice (2014), in: Peacebuildling, Taylor and Francis,
Vol.2, No.1, 11-27.
Reich, H. (2006) Local Ownership in Conflict Transformation Projects: Partnership, Participation or
Patronage? Berghof Occasional Paper 27, Berghof Research Center for Conflict Management, Berlin,
September 2006, ISBN 978-3-927783-79-9, ISBN 3-972783- 79-9, 36 pages
Schirch, Lisa (2006) Civilian Peacekeeping. Preventing Violence and Making Space for Democracy. Uppsala:
Life and Peace
Schweitzer, Christine et al (2001) Nonviolent Peaceforce Feasibility Study.
Schweitzer, Christine (Ed.) (2010) Civilian Peacekeeping A Barely Tapped Resource. Arbeitspapier Nr. 23,
Institute for Peace Work and Nonviolent Conflict Transformation
UN DPKO website http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/news/yir2014.shtml
UNITAR (2015) Strengthening Civilian Capacities to Protect Civilians, web-based course available from
https://www.unitar.org/event/strenghtening-civilian-capacities-protect-civilians-ptp201522e
Wallis, Tim (2010) Best Practice in Nonviolent Peacekeeping in Schweitzer, Christine (Ed.) (2010) Civilian
Peacekeeping A Barely Tapped Ressource. Arbeitspapier Nr. 23, Institute for Peace Work and Nonviolent
Conflict Transformation

Dr. Rachel Julian is Senior Lecturer at the Leeds Beckett University, England.

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3. Panel: Experiences with Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping

Panelists:
Oliver Knabe, Cologne, Executive Secretary of Forum
Civil Peace Services, earlier working with Balkan Peace
Team in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia
Mel Duncan, Minneapolis, Co-Founder and Advocacy
Director of Nonviolent Peaceforce
Rolf Carrire, Geneva, former UNICEF representative in
several Asian countries, and Senior Adviser to NP
Facilitator: Dr. Christine Schweitzer, Minden, Federation for Social Defence
Christine Schweitzer: Have you experienced in your past work situations where you either saw Unarmed Civilian Protection/Peacekeeping (UCP) being used, or, when you look
back, you think it would have been very useful but was missing?

Oliver Knabe:
This morning I wondered if I was invited because the organizers thought I have to share something about UCP, or if it was a strategy to make me think more about UCP. But now I think I have
some examples.
Let me start with Balkan Peace Team, a volunteer project organized in the 1990s by an international coalition of peace organisations in Croatia and Serbia/Kosovo: What Balkan Peace Team did,
had something to do with Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping. In Croatia, we accompanied people to
court cases who had been evicted from their flats. We also did some monitoring in Kosovo before
the violent conflict started. This had elements of UCP though we did not call it that.
Secondly, there have been the many UN missions in the former Yugoslavia, smaller and bigger
ones. At least in some cases I think it was not necessary that it were soldiers who were doing the
peacekeeping work. For example, at the border between Croatia and Montenegro, in Prevlaka,
there was a small mission doing patrolling, walking every day in the border area and watched if
everything was peaceful. That was a mission that lasted five or six years. Was it necessary that
they were soldiers, or not? There was a similar mission in Macedonia. It was considered actually
very successful though it ended before the conflict broke out in 2002.
I thought about divided cities, like Mitrovica in Kosovo. Perhaps you have heard of the bridge
watchers, a group of rather radical people on the Serbian side of Mitrovica. They were watching
who went to the other side of the town. So people were afraid to cross the bridge. I think that
would have been an opportunity for UCP.
In Bosnia-Hercegovina, there were also other divided cities like Mostar or the district of Brko.
Even in Croatia in 1995 when there was a part of the territory under Serbian control there was a
UN Mission - of course completely staffed with soldiers. They were not really successful, because
Croatia was able to regain the territory and at the end, what did they do, they were participating
in negotiations between the Serbian side and the Croatian Government. And that is also something that was not necessarily a task for soldiers.
All in all, there were plenty opportunities in the former Yugoslavia in the last 15 to 20 years for
UCP.

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When I prepared for this panel, and because at the beginning I thought I have no idea where we
have opportunities for UCP, I asked my colleagues in the forumCPS, and they came up with other
ideas from completely different regions. For example, a colleague said, 'Well, what about East Timor?' There was in 1999 the referendum for independence from Indonesia, and then a lot of violence between 1999 and 2002 when the elections took place, and 80% of the infrastructure was
destroyed. That was definitely an opportunity for UCP.
Then there is one of our projects of the forumCPS which is not completely UCP, but related to it.
In the Beqaa Valley close to the Syrian border we have visible, non partial, unarmed, trained compassionate civilians, as Rachel Julian described them, who work together with local counterparts.
The goal is to prevent that violence breaks out among each community or between refugees and
hosting communities. You know the situation probably: up to one refugee, one local person. That
is probably something very close to UCP. It is not a project big in numbers, but what we do is, together with local organizations, bring people in the community and refugees together to discuss
the most pressing issues they have - like lack of electricity, lack of water, problems with medical
supply and stuff like that.
Another idea that came up was South Sudan where NP is already on the ground. For example, at
the moment, there are groups of Dinka with a lot of cattle moving in some parts of the country
and that creates problems with the agricultural population that is already there. That is definitely
not something where soldiers would be necessary, but UCP could do something.
There are probably many more ideas and situations to think about.

Rolf Carrire:
Let me just mention to you how I got acquainted with the concept of Unarmed Civilian Protection
or Peacekeeping. I was at the Parliament of the World Religions in Cape Town in 1999, and I'm
sitting down on the floor with somebody who had a bundle of stencils on which he had written
'are you interested in Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping or Protection?' I don't remember which
word he actually used. I did not know that Mel Duncan had two weeks earlier put that stencil together in California. I did not know Mel, I did not know David Hartsough, the two initiators of
Nonviolent Peaceforce. And here I was sitting down and I looked at this and I said, 'Why haven't I
thought of that?'
I had spent, by that time, almost 30 years working with UNICEF, which deals with child welfare,
child survival, child development and child protection. And this was an 'Aha-Erlebnis' why haven't I thought of this? I was, at that time, the liaison between UNICEF and the World Bank, and I
took the idea immediately to the Development Marketplace in the year 2000 to get the World
Bank colleagues to understand how important this was also for the World Bank. It was such a
bummer. It didn't work at all! In part, because I was unable to explain exactly how this worked.
This was one of the big challenges that we have faced in the beginning of our work. What is it
exactly? I'll come back to this later.
Nonetheless, then I went to Indonesia as UNICEF country director, and I asked David Hartsough,
don't you have someone who can actually help us do protection work in Irian Jaya, now West
Papua? Because there were all sort of conflicts there and we also had other violent conflicts in
Indonesia, e.g., in Maluku, in Ambon, in Aceh, in Kalimantan. And he said yes, there is this guy
David Grant. So David came as a consultant for a couple of month. I offered him a UNICEF job,
but he didn't take it.1
My strongest proposal at that time, when NP was being birthed, was to combine UCP with the
Polio Eradication Program that was in progress at that time. It was clear to me from my experience
1

David later worked for a number of years for Nonviolent Peaceforce until he retired.

16

in Burma, that you could not eradicate polio unless it's eradicated all over the world. And that
meant, that particularly in conflict areas, you would need to have access. NP could have accompanied the health workers and social development workers for children in such areas of violent
conflict. Actually, having NP provide protective accompaniment of these health workers still would
be a good strategic possibility, because 15 years after the goal date of the year 2000, polio still is
not eradicated. And where it is not eradicated? In Afghanistan and Pakistan. And earlier in Nigeria
and Somalia all the places of violent conflict. So, my recommendation is to link the activity of
UCP together with other programs to reach their goals. In fact, most of the Millennium Development Goals were not reached in countries with endemic violence.
In Burma in the early 1990s, we tried that with what was then called humanitarian corridors and
days of tranquillity in Shan state, and something comparable with the Rohingya when I was
country director there. In UNICEF Bangladesh, I could see in retrospect, how the Chittagong Hill
Tracts would have been a very good place to take UPC forward.
I was country programme director also for Bhutan and we had a major problem between the Bhutanese and the Nepali population, many of whom became refugees. It would have been an ideal
project, relatively small, totally manageable.
In India, where I worked for almost ten years with UNICEF, there were many conflict zones. One
example is Kashmir, but the Indian Government would simply not allow any UN agency to deal
with the situationthey have always regarded it as falling entirely within their domestic jurisdiction.
Where UCP could work and NP has a list of criteria to assess a place for possible deployment
that Christine Schweitzer developed when she worked with NP- are countries where it is most
likely that a government or a UN agency is interested in UCP. Looking for optimal preconditions,
an easy one I thought was for NP to take over the peacekeeping in Cyprus. The armed UN mission
there is the longest-lasting peacekeeping operation in the world, and it is totally not necessary
that soldiers are doing that work. This would be a high-profile, low-risk opportunity to show
what UCP can do.
My bottom line is that I find it hard to think of any conflict where UCP could not have been able
to make a contribution at one time or another. And of course the earlier, the better. When the
situation has already become genocidal, then you are not sending people.
Christine Schweitzer: Mel, you started Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) which has been mentioned so many times already, and half of us here have been related to NP at one time or
the other not by total accident. How did this concept of UCP evolve in the field, what
methods are employed, and do you have comments on Rachel Julian's presentation?
Mel Duncan:
I have prepared a series of examples of how Unarmed Civilian Protection is working in the field in
various situations. I think that it's important to put
this within the context. Rachel talked about Unarmed Civilian Protection doing the prevention and
reduction of violence. I would also add on to that
the direct protection of civilians as a third task. If
you look at the protection onion there are those
who work in the enabling conditions for protection,
those who work on enjoyment of human rights, the
provision of basic necessities, and those who work

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on the direct protection of individuals from imminent threat. This is the reason why this is so important is in terms of the advancement of the public policy debates.
Mainstream policy-makers, and especially armed peacekeepers, are now saying, 'we recognize the
contribution of Unarmed Civilian Protection in these three areas'. What they talk about is enabling
the protection environment by protecting the civilians engaged in peacebuilding work. We will see
this come up in public documents later on. But, the point of contention is the argument that Rachel framed at the end with the very important question about the assumption that an armed actor wont yield to anything but a weapon. It is within this circle, the direct protection of civilians
from imminent violence, where we are contesting.
There are a variety of methodologies that have been shown to work in terms of Unarmed Civilian
Protection. They all come from proactive engagement, relationship building, capacity development
and monitoring. What we found in terms of the NGOs that are doing Unarmed Civilian Protection, that they do a combination of one or more of these 10 methodologies that you can see in
the picture below. I illustrate a few of them right now. In terms of practice, Unarmed Civilian Protectors are specially trained all across the world, each organization goes through intense training.
This is not a matter of parachuting people in with rucksacks full of good intentions. This is a matter of people understanding exactly what they are doing.
We work full time, 24/7, as Rachel pointed out. We don't do other things. In most cases we're
multinational and in Nonviolent Peaceforce's case, we right now have people in our teams from
24 countries. We are strategic, we base what we do on a context and conflict analysis that is ongoing. The context analysis is daily. We are nimble. We can move very quickly, that is one of our
advantages. We don't have to pack a lot of equipment. We can move very fast. We are deeply
immersed in the communities. It is very interesting that Rachel found that the first point of commonality is the commitment to nonviolence. We are non-partisan and we are cost-effective. In
terms of debates, we are the fiscal conservatives. We are much cheaper than military options.
You've heard about protective accompaniment.
This is an example in South Sudan. There are a number of protection of civilian areas where now over a
100,000 people have fled. These are not called internally displaced people or IDP camps because that
would dignify the conditions too much. These are
people who came to some proximity of UN compounds, for some semblance of security when the civil
war reignited in December of 2013 and then beyond.
Women leave those camps everyday to collect firewood and water, to grind sorgum. Parties of armed
actors will congregrate outside and will gang-rape the
women routinely. What we found is that if two or
three of our people accompany the women - and this
is not just going out for a walk, this is doing reconnaissance in advance, mapping the routes, planning, a
lot of work that goes into it the perpetrators
back off. We've done a thousand interventions of this type in the last 14 months. Not one time a
woman has been attacked during those interventions. This has worked 100% of the time in a
thousand cases.
Accompaniment works in a large number of situations. This is a photo of one of the co-founders of
NP, Claudia Samayoa who is a Human Rights Defender in Guatemala. When her Women's Human
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Rights Unit got in trouble and started receiving death threats, we were able to send a team very
quickly. As you can see, here is Betsy on the right, watching Claudias back. So Claudia can do the
work and have extra security. This is not glamorous. A good day for us is when nothing happens.
It is not Betsy's business to be involved in the discussions, it is her business to be watching Claudia's back.
I bring this up, because of the question that Rachel posed and that it is one of the most profound
questions we have to contemplate. The assumption that an armed actor will yield to anything but
a weapon.
One other example: A year ago in April, two NP protectors, Derek and Andreas, were in Bor, an
area in South Sudan where thousands of people had congregrated. They were there with 14
women and children on an afternoon in April when the camp was breached and attacked by an
armed militia. People were being shot point blank in the head. Derek and Andreas took the 14
women and children who they were with into a hut, and stood in the doorway. On three occasions young men with brand new guns came up and they said 'you got to go. We want those
people'. They were right in their face screaming at them. On three occasions Andreas and Derek
held up their Nonviolent Peaceforce identity badges and simply said, 'we're unarmed, we're here
to protect civilians and we will not leave'. On three occasions the militia left and these people
were saved. In terms of comparison, there was a battalion of armed UN peacekeepers from India.
During the 20 minutes in which 56 people were shot dead, they were in their compound calling
Delhi for instructions as to how to proceed.
So one of the other differences is the decentralization of power. Derek and Andreas didn't have to
call Juba or Brussels to find out what to do. In fact, if you listen to the interview that is on our
website, they said, 'that's when the training kicked in'.
Ceasefire monitoring. This is an example from Mindanao where we have been since 2007. In
2009 we were invited by both the government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation
Front to be an official party to the ceasefire agreement. That illustrates the value of being nonpartisan. For the next four years, we were given the responsibility for monitoring of civilian protection. So we had 9 posts throughout the Island monitoring civilian protection aspects of the ceasefire agreement. More important, and that refers to the differences between third-party intervention and UCP, we worked with and trained 300 local people throughout the Island. They monitored, intervened, and reported on violations of the agreement. That spread out the ownership of
that agreement so that people felt that they were part of it. This was one of the elements that has
led to a comprehensive peace agreement that now is still holding.
Interpositioning is one of the least used of the methodologies, but it is used. One example
comes from Mindanao during the ceasefire. There was a village of about 1000 people, and a patrol of the armed forces of the Philippines was converging from this side and a patrol from the
Moro Islamic Liberation Front was coming the other side. People started to panic and packed up
to leave. The elders called a NP team that was in the vicinity and told them what was happening.
So our team went, and on route, called the local commander of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the local commander of the Moro Islamic Liberation front who they had both on speeddial. And mind you, neither of these are pacifist organisations ... They said: 'There must be a mistake. You guys are converging on this village. We are sure you don't want that to happen. People
are wanting to flee. And to ensure that this doesn't happen, we will send a team to stay at the
village until you guys back off.' Both armed groups backed off and a thousand people could stay
home.
Strengthening local peace infrastructure is another thing Rachel talked about. This is something that's happening within South Sudan right now. And helping to identify and enhancing local peace infrastructures is a major element to the new Syria project that we're working on. A
week ago right now, we were in Beirut meeting with representatives of local Syrian civil society

19

who'd come out three by three in taxi cabs, to not attract attention, to talk about their localized
work. This is another point Rachel made, that this work is very localized. It's always local.
The women peacekeeping teams: There are ten of these in South Sudan. These are women
who are working on what peace studies would call more traditional kinds of war related conflicts.
But they also now are doing things like intervening with women in their communities, for example mothers when they are trying to marry their daughters at an early age, and are working with
them in terms of the value of their daughters staying in school instead of marrying so early. They
are intervening with women to report rapes, which is under-reported everywhere, and highly under-reported in South Sudan. So providing accompaniment to women, sometimes throughout the
process, when they report rapes, is one of their tasks.
Another example is one that was identified in the NP Feasibility Study is the accompaniment of
Guatemalan refugees in 1990 when they returned from Mexico. This was large-scale. It was
done over a period of years. It was done when people were under threat. It was done by NGOs
that were also working with UN organizations.
I think today, we should be challenging ourselves to see what kind of Unarmed Civilian Protection
could be provided to accompany Syrian refugees. I thought yesterday as I rode on an airplane for
four hours coming from Beirut, that route that was so easy to look down to, and think of the tens
of thousands of people who are walking that route right now and are being held up. What can
we do with Nonviolent Peaceforce, what can we do with German Civil Peace Services to come
together and to develop a response to provide a kind of appropriate accompaniment that we
know worked in other situations? I will end my input with that challenge.

Discussion on the panel

Oliver Knabe: Actually, I thought about the EU Directive number 51/2001/ES ten years ago. That
Directive is the main reason why refugees cannot take the plane to enter Europe. So, there is a
point in accompanying refugees, but my first reaction was, let's change the EU Directive so that
people can take the plane. Because it's much cheaper than paying all the guys that send you on
boats to Europe and it's simple, because it is only the EU policy that doesn't allow that you to take
a flight without a valid document.
Actually our organization is constantly reflecting our response to the refugees crisis, because we
are in the regions where the people come from, for example in Lebanon, we are in regions where
refugees pass through (Macedonia, in Serbia), and we have our projects in Germany where the
refugees come to the in communities. Mel is making is a valid point because there are these stories what's happening at the border from Macedonia to Serbia, for example, where they get
ripped of and pay like 100 Euros for taxi ride that costs actually 3 Euro. It wouldnt take a lot to
help them.
Rolf Carrire: Yesterday Mel and I talked with colleagues of the United Nations Volunteers Program in Bonn, and we put to them the idea that perhaps some organizations together (UNV, NP,
perhaps also with support of UNICEF) could protect at the very least pregnant women and those
with very young children, and accompany them. UNV are willing to consider this. They said that
they could easily give 10-20 of their staff, their volunteers. Perhaps this could be something that
needs not be confined to the UN volunteers. Other volunteer organizations could perhaps join in.
Mel and I intend over the next weeks to take this further. I already talked to the Regional Director
of UNICEF who is in charge of the refugee issue, and she is just waiting for people with good ideas. So this is perhaps the right moment to push this idea through.
Christine Schweitzer: One more theoretical question. Last week I have been to a Peacebuilding Forum by a German organisation called FriEnt (Working Group Peace and De20

velopment). It was a big event in Berlin. One of the discussions centred around the question if our concepts about peacebuilding that we developed 20, 30 years ago still meet
the challenges of today. Or has violent conflict have changed so much that our answers
are old-fashioned and do not give the right answers to the challenges of today? So the
question to you: Has the context and the character of violence and of armed conflicts
changed over the last 20 years? Would you conform this assumption? And is UCP something that can be an answer or give an answer to new challenges like transnational
armed groups?
Oliver Knabe: Definitely, conflicts have changed. That's what we see in Ukraine, Iraq and Syria. Is
UCP suitable, too? I think if I take seriously what Rachel said in the morning, we don't know. It's
unique and we have to find out. But I would also say that it is worth trying, because the reaction
that you would probably get from an Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeper popping up in any conflict
would be different from the reaction you get from your environment when you arrive there as an
armed soldier. That's maybe a simple answer, but probably I think it's worth to try.
Rolf Carrire: My first reaction is that we will have our hands full for decades to come with the
old types of war and violence. So, while it's an interesting issue to discuss, whether the new types
of violence and wars are susceptible or will yield to Unarmed Civilian Protection or Peacekeeping,
its not a pressing issue in my view. We have this 1,5 billion people worldwide who live in situations of violence. 1,5 billion! There are at least 70 violent conflicts being followed by different
organizations, for example the International Crisis Group or the UN. The question is always, I
think, what can we do about those traditional forms of war and violence. I think this depends
very much on the stage the violent conflict has reached. The earlier you can get involved, the better it is. Of course, there are these types like ISIS for example, or counter-terrorism activities,
where somebody in Texas is steering a drone towards people these are not the kind of contexts
where UCP can do anything. Also in cases of criminal violence like the drugs traffickers and the
Mafiosi it would be very difficult to see how Unarmed Civilian Protection could do something effective. In fact, what has been happening over the last maybe 50 years or so is an erosion of the
humanitarian principles.
Something very promising to look at in this context is the International Committee of the Red
Cross, and the International Federation of Red Cross / Red Crescent Societies in Geneva. They are
wondering whether the humanitarian principles from the Geneva Convention need an update
and to what degree they are still relevant. Questions are particularly asked about the issues of
neutrality and impartiality, and there is some refining of definitions going on. But the very fact
that now some organizations in world deliberately target innocent civilians, target hospitals and
schools is a total change of the traditional form of war, where at least the principle of civilian
immunity was better kept up than today.
And so, I think, that ultimately there is one question about Unarmed Civilian Protection: I would
like to see UCP not nearly be something that always comes in from the outside, helps to do something, and then leave. Usually that's how we are conceiving of Unarmed Civilian Protection: we
would be in for a while, maybe organize something, maybe leave behind some protection capacities for the communities, but eventually we would leave. We have stopped for example our project in Sri Lanka. I think that was a mistake. We really need to begin to look at a new way of how
can we create an ongoing indigenous capacity for Unarmed Civilian Protection. And a way to do
that, perhaps, is to work together with the largest organization in the world that is actually a hybrid NGO/IGO: the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. They
have a hundred million volunteers and officers. It's the largest NGO. It's also a Governmental Organization. And they have of course a lot of money. But if we could get them interested, since
they exist in virtually all the countries of the world, and have been established by acts of parliament in each of these countries if we could get them interested to not only deal with first aid
and disaster situations but to be ready at the first sign of violence in any country, with their own
staffs trained in UCP who would actually immediately be available to do UCP work, then you can
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earlier on get involved in conflicts and prevent the spreading of the violence. That, to my mind,
would be an ideal evolution of UCP.
Oliver Knabe: One thing about the Red Cross. On the one hand I like the idea, on the other
hand I am looking at the refugee crisis in Croatia. It is more the local population, spontaneously
organized, who at the beginning started to help people, to cook and so on. The Red Cross is a big
organization but not necessarily able to react quickly on a larger scale in Croatia. That does not
mean not to contact them.
Regarding your question whether UCP can help in this changed contexts. We had actually a similar question about the Westphalian peace in the morning, the idea that people just have to get to
know liberal democracy, and everything will be fine at the end. So if that's not working than
probably the element you've mentioned, namely that UCP is always on a local level and not necessarily dealing with whether there is a national government or not, is something that is also helpful in this context.
Mel Duncan: In terms of the changing nature of violent conflict, that is true and that is not. Recently, Claudia Samayoa, the human rights defender from Guatemala, turned to me and said 'Oh,
I long for the clarity of the right-wing death squads of old. It's so much more complicated now in
terms of the local trafficking and various oligarchies who have their own militias and how they are
related to gangs in the US.'
Clearly, we cannot trivialize the rise of groups like ISIS. And that is informing our work in a number of ways that are emerging. First of all, this emphasis on localised approaches is much stronger
than when we started. Last weekend, when we were meeting with Syrian activists we were talking about projects, some of which will be neighbourhood-based, will be very small scale, will be
under the radar, are not out there publicizing. You won't probably see in the next year or so the
uniforms of NP traipsing around Aleppo. But the work would have been done. It brings us under
the radar much more. It always has to depend on the context in analysing how the combatants
can respond to various pressures, because we work both with encouragement and deterrence.
What are those ways that armed actors like ISIS can be deterred? Because I can't give you an answer today, doesn't mean that we don't have the answer. We need to look at how we can engage with such actors, and at the same time always be humble that we can not work in every situation. There have been situations throughout NP's history where we have analysed and gone
back to local groups and said, 'We are sorry, we can't help you'. And we have to be upfront
about that as well.

Input and questions from the audience

Do you have enough volunteers in order to perform that work, because it appears to me that
you have to need a good preparation, of course, but also need people who are very
courageous.

Regarding the primacy of the local: In the conflict area I do understand why it is important,
but I'm the one who is representing all this examples to a German audience. And they say,
'well it's nice that there are some small villages but you didn't change anything regarding the
wider conflict, like in South Sudan where they are fighting each other at the governmental
level'.

When you say that UCP cannot go in all situations, are you considering building coalitions of
several organisations?

The German Civil Peace Service has been considered in other European countries as an
outstanding example. But has it changed anything in Germany regarding the debate of who
can provide the protection? Did you perceive that some of the interlocutors in the army are

22

now understanding or respecting or even have heard at all about the Civilian Service and that
there is now a civilian provider of protection? Or do you avoid that level of debate in order to
not to be too confrontational?

I read the interview with Derek who protected these IDPs in South Sudan. Do you also have
traumatized members of NP? It is a wonderful story on the one side, but if it means getting
traumatized, how does that go together with being professional and protecting the own
staff?

Mel Duncan: If we have enough volunteers: First of all, our people are not volunteers, they are
being paid full-time and that's key. Typically, their services last two years. We never lack for recruits. We typically will have 10 applicants for every position that we have available. We do lack
for money to pay them. The week before last, I was involved with a number of members of the
US congress who wrote President Obama in advance of the Peacekeeping Summit at the UN to
insert UCP as part of that discussion. You may remember a week ago Monday, President Obama
did gain commitments of thirty thousand more armed peacekeepers. That's a thirty percent increase. And think what we can do with thirty thousand unarmed civilian protectors. And so, in
terms of just accompanying those women in South Sudan, if we had instead of a hundred and
fifty people on the ground, which is historically the largest sustained deployment of UCP, ten
times that many, they could just be deployed.
In terms of the localized priority and does that change
things: I'm not terribly dogmatic, but I do believe that
change comes from the bottom up. So that change
does come from the localized areas where we have
been involved. If you think about the concepts of
track 1, track 2 and track 3, the pyramids that we got
in peace studies, then we work at Track 3, at the
grassroots' level helping them to advocate at the
Track 1 level. For example some of the women from
the women peacekeeping team in South Sudan have
gone to Addis to advocate and educate for an end to
the overall conflict. We are working at some intertribal issues primarily Nuer and Dinka but also some
Equatorian women - coming together with a
concerted demand to stop the war, and do that on
multi tracks.

John-Paul Lederach

In terms of the traumatized situation: Yes, our people do get traumatized, and we do have treatment available for them. But we are increasing and not doing well enough in training people to
recognize trauma in themselves, in their team mates and in their communities. We are working
and living in communities where have been multi-generations of trauma. But that's something
that has to be much more institutionalised in dealing with this.
Rolf Carrire: We have now new ways dealing with trauma that are much more effective and
much more cost-effective and efficient, where you can deal with groups, and really deal with the
psychological traumanot only with the social dimensions of the problem. It will be the subject
of an e-learning course that UNITAR will pick up on by the middle of 2016. I hope that NP, in its
further evolution, will include an active trauma therapy component.
Oliver Knabe: One question was if the German military would be afraid of this new development: No, they are not afraid, otherwise they would have sent a replacement for the officer who
cancelled his participation at last moment to follow this discussion today.

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If you talk to military personnel they would all say that we need conflict prevention. They all agree
about saying that 'we are just the last way out, just in case all the other things don't work'. So
there is the question what we are offering, what NP is offering, what Civil Peace Serivce is doing
is it just another small item in German Foreign Policy or is indeed a paradigm shift needed? I think
that's the open question. If I look at the Agenda 2030 that was just adopted by the UN, I would
say that obviously there is a paradigm shift needed. It is nice that we get this thirty-nine million
Euros for Civil Peace Services (CPS) each year, but as long as just the adaptation of new machine
guns to tanks that Germans military got costs fifty millions, you see there are wrong priorities.
There was a question about coalition-building: CPS is already a coalition of eight organizations,
forumCPS is a coalition with BSV is a member, and we just became member of the NP Alliance, so
there are coalitions. The question is how fruitful they are.
Back to the paradigm shift and the agenda 2030: On Wednesday I'll participate in a discussion
with environmental groups and trade unions etc. about how to adapt this agenda to German Policy and to find a joined statement. So there is a peace organisation that joins that discussion. I
think that is probably a big task, because this group wanted to have a joined statement before
the agenda was adopted, and it was not possible then. So what we preach we also need to do
ourselves.

24

4. Panel: Glass Ceilings. On the Political Acceptance of the Concept

Panelists:
Alessandro Rossi, former Director of the Centro
Studi Difesa Civile (Civilian Defence Study Centre,
Rome, Italy) former Steering Committee member
of EPLO and worker with Nonviolent Peaceforce,
now working at the EU Commission
Oliver Knabe, Executive Secretary of Forum Civil
Peace Services, earlier working with Balkan Peace
Team in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia
Mel Duncan, Co-Founder and Advocacy Director
of Nonviolent Peaceforce
Rolf Carrire, former head of UNHCR and WFO
and with World Bank in Asia
Facilitation: Christine Schweitzer
Christine Schweitzer: The topic of this second panel is the advocacy work with international organisations. BSV had a symposium a year ago focussing on the German context,
including someone from parliament and from churches. So question now: What do international organisations do or what should they be doing to support UCP?
Alessandro, you gave about two years ago a presentation in a workshop of the Institute
of Peace Work and Nonviolent Conflict Transformation in Aachen, where you talked
about advocacy work in the context of the question if the European Union is a power
for peace or if it is militarizing.

Alessandro Rossi:
I will not repeat what I said then or wrote later in an article in the issue of the Peace Review2 that
focuses on UCP (unarmed civilian peacekeeping). Just shortly: The European Union is not a power
for peace or a power for war. It is in the end just an international bloc of countries. It has the potential to increase the space for civilian means to deal with conflicts. And that is already happening. Nonviolent Peaceforce together with other peacebuilding organisations that are in Brussels
gather under the platform called European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO)3, and have contributed a lot in moving this debate in Brussels.
What I would like to focus on today is the role and limitations of governmental actors in the field
of unarmed civilian peacekeeping. Rolf spoke of 1,5 billion people under threat of violence. Can
NGOs be the only actors to face that kind of challenge? On the other hand, we know that armed
peacekeeping definitely is not enough or may even have some counter effects.
How can we get international organisations like the EU, OSCE, UN to engage in UCP? This discussion really started already in the 1990s in the face of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. When
in 1998 the Kosovo Verification Mission was set up, some governments like the Italian made a call
to civil society to send staff to that mission. And even before we had campaigned for a Civil Peace
Corps though that did not materialize, at least not back then. We then started to campaign for
White Helmets as we call them in Italy, as a wider concept than what has really been realised on
the UN level under such a label.
2
Rossi, Alessandro (2015) The Glass Ceiling for UCP in Inter-Governmental Organizations, Peace Review 1/2015, pp 917, http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cper20/27/1
3

www.eplo.org

25

Basically there are at least four elements to be distinguished in missions that already took place,
carried out by the EU or by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) or the
UN, that already have implicitly at least four of the tasks that we have seen in recurrent nongovernmental UCP missions.
1. They do send unarmed people to stay on the on the ground for middle or long-term work.
There are comprehensive missions or civilian crisis management missions by the EU, some of them
I personally visited, where personnel is hired with the task to stay in contact with local civil society.
The importance of relationship with the local population is now more and more embedded in
such missions, also the current OSCE mission in Ukraine has for example such an element.
2. They protect people affected by violent conflict.
3. They increase the local peoples own security provisions.
4. This staff is civilian and has usually undergone a specific training for such tasks.
However, there is a problem with the
mandate. Often protection is to be
found more between the lines on the
mandate level, though it is much
clearer at field level where the head of
mission does assign such tasks. But
there are several implicit obstacles that
governmental organisations are facing
when dealing with the protection from
violence. They all together create a
glass ceiling which it is difficult to
break through. These obstacles relate
to different necessities that have been
identified for UCP to work well.
1. UCP needs a clear mandate to be trusted by locals.
But the mandates for international missions, the OSCE mission in Ukraine right now and in
1998/99, the European civilian crisis management missions, especially the purely civilian ones, like
in Georgia or the humanitarian mission in Aceh (Indonesia) after the civil war there, they always
have what could be called a constructive ambiguity. Constructive ambiguity in mission mandates is there because:
Organisations needed to get different governments agendas on board
National governments hesitate to explicitly mandate civilian international organisations to
be security providers, because providing security is a role central to their own legitimacy,
and so far embodied by the military/law enforcement bodies. In the Western concept of
state security is a task of the nation state.
The embodiment of security provision in the eyes of national governments is usually the
police or the army.
2. UCP needs reliable long-term planning and openness to innovation.
But the Western liberal democracies have by definition short political cycles because they need to
be re-elected in the following elections. This means that they are not prone to long-term investments in a conflict area.
A second problem in this regard is that international organisations have less and less core resources. They are under pressure to save public money, taxpayers money. They need to demonstrate short-term impact with the money they give for example to the United Nations. It is difficult
for them to say, oh, we just give money to the UN because it's good to have an international
body. The need to demonstrate fast impact means a project approach quickly coming to a conflict area, being seen as very busy, and quickly leaving again. That is inherent in the intergovernmental decision-making system and how the main donors (which are Western democracies) work.

26

3. UCP needs honest and continuous lessons learning.

The third set of obstacles is that - and behind closed doors the participants in those missions are
very clear about that - honest monitoring and evaluation is not possible in intergovernmental
missions, because there is the lack of clear benchmarks / targets that come from the constructive
ambiguity we spoke about. You want to get everybody on board, the focus of interest varies (one
wants to decrease the number of victims, the other wishes to focus on economic development,
the third on rule of law, etc.). So there are no benchmarks, but how do you monitor without
benchmarks? And in many cases, even when evaluations come out, they stay as secret as possible.
Because the lessons to be learned normally mean that one of the governments was right and the
other was wrong with proposing a certain line to the mission, and that's of course not diplomatically correct.
4. UCP needs to be seen as non-partisan by all local actors.
Intergovernmental organisations run a high risk to be or to be perceived as partisan, which is at
the end the same. The reason is that the local population have had in their history some bad experience with one of these governments, given that the European countries have in a way or another be involved in problematic relations in maybe 95% of the countries of the world. It's very
probable that you have someone who has a French colonial past or a German kind of sensitivity or
had something to complain about with the Brits or Italians, etc. Moreover, normally the states
having a past with those conflicted places are those wanting to be part of the intergovernmental
mission. This is somewhat unavoidable when you have an intergovernmental organisation fielding
people in conflict areas.
5. UCP needs coordination of civilian actors and flexible responses to field realities.
But international organisations, that is the fifth set of obstacles, have a bureaucratic 'silo' mentality, making it difficult to coordinate across them and between departments. In the field the same
people will need water and sanitation, protection, help to talk to their superiors, build a bit of a
rule of law etc. But cooperation on a horizontal level between departments of organisations is not
easy, because the international organisation workers career/task-sharing does not depend on
their colleagues in the other agency/department, they depend on his or her superiors in New York
or Brussels or a national government. It's inherent to the organisation of intergovernmental organisation that the coordination on the ground is very difficult to build.
Nevertheless, to end on a more hopeful note, in the UN we have
multi-dimensional peacekeeping: Mel can tell us more of the last report that was made to
the Secretary General. It is now clear, it is now really mainstream that armed actors alone
are not sufficient to stop violence.
protection of civilians by civilians: at least in certain agencies this is recognized
a build-up of civilian capacities, of rosters of specialists etc.
In the EU, there is space for the civilian crisis management missions, missions that include tasks
like cease-fire monitoring. Examples are the missions in Georgia, in Aceh and to a certain extent in
Congo.
Secondly the funding to NGOs doing UCP has grown substantially, not to say exponentially, in the
EU. When I started working with NP in 2004, we were at zero. In 2006 the European Parliament
nearly voted for an agency for peacebuilding as we now have an agency for defence. That failed
due to a vote of a German MEP who happened to be the Chair of the Committee. But soon after,
the Instrument for Stability was created. That is a fund intended for intervention in conflict situations, though only a part of it is really for peace work, mostly it is meant to prevent the spreading
of biological and chemical weapons. But with the Instrument the funding for NGOs definitely
went up, and included also grants to NP and to several other organisations.
Thirdly, there is a build-up of stand- by civilian capacity (mediation, European Institute for Peace,
EU aid volunteers, though the latter now has more the character of a voluntary or humanitarian
aid corps).

27

And last but not least: in the OSCE, there are more and more unarmed civilian teams on the
ground Kosovo 1998-99, Ukraine 2014 ongoing. And they are also building up stand-by capacity (REACT etc.)
So the glass ceilings are real, they are there. The
point is, we cannot see too much in advance the
cracks in the glass ceiling. But they can be there.
You know very well what happens with cars, right?
We have a kid throwing a coin on your glass and
you see nothing as an impact, but the day after the
crack is big.
I don't want to throw coins to anybody but you never know when the cracks appear, so it is important to get ready.
Christine: Mel, you are one of the co-founders of NP, and you have worked for many
years for the acceptance of UCP at the UN. So the question to you: What are your objectives in that advocacy work? What would you like the UN to do?
Mel Duncan:
Let me start with a little poem by Leonard Cohen: Ring the bells, that still can ring. Forget your

perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. There is a crack in
everything. That's how the light gets in.
So speaking of cracks in the glass ceiling: I spend a considerable amount of my time working in a blue obelisk that
happens to have very few portals. The blue obelisk is
called the UN. Yet within that obelisk, there are the cracks.
I'm going to remember this metaphor about the wind
shield. That's a really good one. If you look at what happened in the past year, there is a convergence of activities
that are going on right now. In the past year high level
reviews were appointed on peace operations, on peacebuilding architecture and on women peace and security.
The High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations issued their report in June.4 They said that
unarmed strategies must be at the forefront of UN efforts to protect civilians. That is a strong
statement and one that is defended by the 16 members of that Panel.
When you hear about panels like that one, you may think, well, you know, they come and go,
there is one every month. But that's not true. The last High-Level Independent Panel on Peace
Operations was the Brahimi Report, which was 15 years ago. So these are not frequent but are
certainly referred to. Within that report of the High-Level Panel on Peace Operations of 2015 they
specifically acknowledge the work of NGOs to ensure protection by presence and by commitment
to nonviolent strategies for protection, saying that missions should make every effort to elaborate
these nonviolent practices. And in view of the contributions of un-armed civilian actors, missions
should work closely with local communities and national and international nongovernmental organisations in building a protective environment. So is not direct protection, but they are almost there.
Here you see (next page) Ban Ki Moon, and Jose Ramos-Horta the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and
former President of Timor Leste. The panel was chaired by Ramos-Horta, who is on your left. If
you wonder about campaigning, about coalition-building, about building a base: 15 years ago I
remember the night David Hartsough, the other co-founder of NP, called me and said, Hey, I just
4

http://www.un.org/sg/pdf/HIPPO_Report_1_June_2015.pdf

28

talked to Jos Ramos-Horta on the phone, he endorsed Nonviolent

Peaceforce. And I remember thinking on the phone: Well that's
great. But we got work to do. Well, when Ban Ki Moon appointed Jos Horta as chair a year ago this month, I wrote him, and I think I
started out by saying: Do you remember us? Within half an hour I
had an e-mail back from Jos saying: I remember you, I followed your
work. It is creative and courageous. He among others on that panel
made the opening for us to get that information about UCP into this
panel. So don't underestimate the relationship you are building in
terms of the work that you do.
Now, shortly after that report, the Secretary General charged a team of people in the secretariat
to write his response that will be presented to the General Assembly on Monday. Something happened on the way to the secretariat. There is no mention about unarmed strategies in the Secretary Generals reply. It's gone. The penholders within the secretariat who wrote that report came
from the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. So when we talk about self-preservation, momentums, sustainability, they simply didn't include it in the Secretary Generals report, even
though it was a prominent portion of the report.
Here you see a panel that was three weeks
ago, sponsored by the international Peace
Institute, right across the street from the
headquarters of the UN. On the left there is
Tiffany Easthom, who is been our long time
Country Director in South Sudan and now
has just moved to direct the Syria protect.
Youssef Mahmoud, a long time diplomat,
was on the panel and was quite upset that
UCP was not included.
What will happen now is that the General Assembly will look at both reports side by side instead
of just the Secretary Generals report.
While we can make advances we can never assume that we made it.
Other people within the Department of Peacekeeping Operations are saying in their presentations
how they are already doing unarmed civilian protection. So for example I heard DPKO were doing
firewood collections with women and things like that.
But then there are also people who say we take this seriously and we want to work with you on
operationalising this. So there are these cracks even within the department and in the agencies.
There is a Global Study of the Implementation of UN-Security Council resolution 1325. That is another high level report that will come out this Wednesday.5 And we do believe that there will be
strong recommendations of the promotion of women's empowerments, on nonviolent means of
protection and specific recommendation on the scaling up of UCP. And there will be specific examples of UCP within that report.
Within the Sustainable Development Goals6 there is the goal 16, which is to promote peaceful
and inclusive societies for sustainable development and provide access to justice for all and build
effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels. This is not as obvious as it sounds:
the Millennium Development Goals that were passed in 2000 did not have a goal related to
peace. This was a struggle that basically civil society waged for a couple of years to make sure
that there is a goal on peace included, recognising that without it the other 16 goals are unattainable unless you have sustainable peace. That really gives us an opportunity to build and advo5
The report can be downloaded from here: http://wps.unwomen.org/~/media/files/un%20women/wps/highlights/unwglobal-study-1325-2015.pdf
6

See https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics.

29

cate for a lot of the things we collectively stand for. Not only just unarmed civilian protection but
other goals that we work on in terms of peace. Because there are criteria, this is benchmarked,
this will be monitored over the next 15 years and gives us something to hang our work on for the
next decade and a half .
Christine: Rolf, what do you think as someone who knows the UN from the inside, what
are the biggest obstacles in advocacy work to convince politicians and practitioners
within these official bodies of something like unarmed civilian peacekeeping / protection?

Rolf Carrire:
I've been working with Mel in New York on this issue for the last ten years. It has been an obstacle course. What he is describing, these two or three paragraphs in the UN report, took ten years
to produce. And this is well known in the UN. It is what we sometimes call millimetre progress.
You have these big conferences and they take two months and then maybe you may have centimetre progress. This is the nature of international cooperation through the UN.
I want to take you through a couple of the obstacles that we have faced, beginning with four
small ones:
Nonviolent Peaceforce had the problem of having to explain all the time that nonviolence
doesn't mean civil disobedience. Which of course in the original Gandhian sense it means
that. We are abiding by the law of the country where we work.
The term 'peacekeeping' has been very much copyrighted by the UN Department of
Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO). And so we were wisely counselled by one of our
colleagues in UNITAR7 to move away from that term. So we have started to say that UCP
stands for Unarmed Civilian Protection, and suddenly doors are open and suddenly things
were a lot easier. We now use the term protection to describe what NP does, although
in the field the term peacekeeping is still often used.
When we in the early days of NP sought accreditation with UN ECOSOC (Economic and
Social Council), the accreditation was challenged by China because we were perceived as
dealing with the issue of Tibet.
One obstacle particularly with the DPKO is that if you speak of unarmed civilian
peacekeeping or protection they say, 'oh, we already do that. We have civilian officers,
several 1,000 actually'. Certainly they have these civilian officers, but most of them are
civil affairs people who deal with election monitoring, communications or logistics. Not
with the direct protection of civilians under threat.
Bigger obstacles have to do with all the issues that have been mentioned this morning.

There is really little or no understanding of UCP concepts or practice or philosophy or

organisation. We need to focus on that challenge. We need to articulate better what UCP
is, because if we don't do that, then we can't expect people to understand this new
concept. UCP is a bit counter-intuitive. For example, how can unarmed be effective
against armed violence? How is that possible? Or how can it even be superior to regular
peacekeeping, as we sometimes claim?
A second challenge is that many people ask to whom a civil society organisation is
accountable. In a military structure you know who actually gets the mandate from whom
and how everything is organized. But for NP in any of these countries it is not immediately
clear. It is a self-given mandate, to actually tell the truth, and this should be totally OK!
Then there are these people who say, we had quite a few of them, including some

United Nations Institute for Training and Research, http://www.unitar.org/

30

diplomats in New York for example, Isn't exposing staff to violence irresponsible, if there
is not the possibility of the use of armed force? And in NP, as you may know, on the
badges of our field staff, on the reverse site, it actually says that in case of kidnapping or
abduction, we don't want to be liberated using military, armed force. These are issues that
sometimes have become contentious when you deal with the diplomats.
Then there is the question of scientific evidence that UCP works. And this has been a very
hard one. Even though, as Rachel pointed out, there are methods of evaluation and that
we know what works, they want to see evaluation research published in peer reviewed,
scientific journals. Only then is it real. Then they begin to take it seriously.
Another point is that there is to some extent a disbelief that UCP can be truly impartial,
neutral and independent. The question is asked where we get the money from and if if we
aren't asked to do in return a little bit for this donor country or for a certain cause.
The biggest obstacles in a way are those convictions and beliefs that Rachel already touched
upon:

The dominant belief that use of armed force is necessary and effective.
Here is the belief that the nation state is supreme. Nation states or their derivates UN,
OSCE, NATO - have the monopoly on the use of armed force. But they should not have
the monopoly over peacekeeping. By and large, internationally speaking, human security,
which has been a discourse at the UN for at least 25 years, is still subordinated to national
security.
We like to talk about the global culture of nonviolence, but there is a global culture of
violence. Arms are a huge business and yield huge profits also think of the work of
private military/security companies.
There is a consciousness factor: In a sense, unless we collectively increase our
consciousness of what happens in the world, the basic realities in the world, we will lack
the imagination to move toward a new system. It is actually strange that 70 years ago we
set up the UN system with the UN charter at its base. Isn't it time to review this charter?
And to see whether there are principles that are obsolete by now? Or new ones we
should embrace in the 21st century?
Last not least: Many people are sceptical about an autonomous role for the civil society
sector in dealing with violent conflicts.

Now, how do you overcome these obstacles to UCP?

From the start of NP's work it was decided that we would have a dual track. We would advocate
internationally, particular at the UN. And we would demonstrate at the field level how things actually work and that they work. Why did we start with the advocacy to UN? Because the UN has
the mandate on peace. This is what they are supposed to be doing. But it doesn't mean that they
also have the monopoly over that topic.
Now it's useful to understand that theres actually not just one UN, but three UNs as it is now
sometimes being distinguished. There is the UN as the arena of the nation states the General
Assembly. There are the secretariats of the UN and its agencies UNICEF, WHO, UNESCO, ILO etc.
And then there is the third UN, the interweave with civil society, the constant interaction between
civil society organisations and the first two UNs. And that is where a lot of creative work is taking
place.
So we started to identify what the possibly receptive agencies at the UN would be. We began an
inventory in 2007 and we came up with 35 UN agencies that might have an interest in UCP. We
focused very much on UNICEF, UNHCR and DPKO (though we didnt get very far with the latter).
We also identified and cultivated relationships with some key policy entrepreneurs. These are
insiders who really know how the system works and are also highly regarded by their colleagues.
So there was one person of this sort who gave us access to weekly meetings with ambassadors of

31

the Security Council. We were surprised that we could get that kind of interaction and access to
that level of people. From these interactions it became very clear to me that even the most powerful people in the world who are sitting in these fora are really looking for new ideas. Very often
they don't know what to do (e.g., with regard to Syria, DRC). So when an idea like UCP comes
along, at least there is an opening, there is sometimes a crack in the glass ceiling.
We also cultivated relationships with four states particularly interested in UCP: the Philippines,
Costa Rica, Belgium and Benin. They gave us an opportunity at the UN to present the ideas on
UCP in well- attended meetings that really helped us along and also helped us to see where the
problems were, where we hadn't been clear enough.
We also formed good relationships with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. And of course,
very important, the financial donors helped us.
We worked very hard to place UCP within the context of various global discourses:
Responsibility to Protect (R2P), 2001
Protection of Civilians (PoC), 1999
Peacebuilding
UN Framework for Analysis of Atrocity Crimes 2004, 2014
Culture of Peace and Nonviolence (1999)
Children in Armed Conflict (1990s)
Infrastructures For Peace (2013)
Mediation (2014)
Women, Peace and Security 1325 (2000)
Some recent breakthroughs have been:
HIPPO report (the mentioned report on peace operations)8
Peace Architecture report9
Women, Peace and Security report (see footnote 3)
There are some lessons that we have learned about successful advocacy. A key success ingredient
is that a trusted friend of us keeps saying: Follow up, follow up, follow up. The fact that there
is a new report, that is favourable to unarmed approaches like UCP, by itself doesn't mean anything. It can even be shelved. In fact, for example the Brahimi report was never probably followed
up, because there were too many other things that happened right after it, including 9/11. So
there is a need for civil society particularly to continue to follow up. And also to identify where the
obstacles are going to be, where the resistance will come from, the interference that can be expected. And, as our friend says, it is vital to get into dialogue especially with those who will oppose the ideas. It is not enough to merely to get agreement from a confirmed internationalist. We
love to hang out with confirmed internationalists. But you need to work actually with the others.

Oliver Knabe:
I fully agree with the last sentence. It is important not to preach to the converted but try to find
the other groups and get in contact with them.
As to opportunities, for advocacy, I already mentioned the Agenda 2030 (SDGs) that is an opportunity because it has a little momentum at least. Nobody knows about that review of the UNPeacekeeping-system. Even some people whose job it would be to know something about it have
no clue what it is. But at least the agenda 2030 is something that is a topic in Germany. There is
the OSCE presidency next year which will be a new opportunity to talk about UCP and the role of
civil society in peacebuilding.
8

http://www.un.org/sg/pdf/HIPPO_Report_1_June_2015.pdf

http://www.un.org/en/peacebuilding/pdf/150630%20Report%20of%20the%20AGE%20on%20the%202015%20Pe
acebuilding%20Review%20FINAL.pdf

32

I like the idea to ask where there are conflicts, where there is no interest of politics to get involved
but where is a need or pressure from the public to do something, and to see whether there is an
opportunity for pilot projects. This issue of divided cities, no matter if it is Srebrenica or Baghdad
or Derry or whereever, is something that could be followed up. This is a limited area, you don't
need too many people, it's something where the need is obvious and there are many connections
between divided cities that can be easily reactivated or used. It is not such a big thing as monitoring a peace deal in Mindanao which may be to difficult to plan.
The Reflecting on Peace Practice Project10 pointed out that you need both more people and you
need key people in order to effect a change. So it's the same here. We need to inform the public
about the opportunities of UCP and the peace work, and we need to reach key people. And in
order to reach key people we have to address topics that are important for them, for example currently the issue of refugees.

10

A project carried out by the Colloborative for Development Action, www.cdainc.com, the organisation founded by
Mary B. Anderson (Do No Harm).

33

5. Brainstorming by Participants: What Could be Done in Germany?

The last half hour of the symposium was used for smallgroup work of the participants. They were given the
question if they had ideas what could be done to promote UCP in their country (resp. Countries- we also had
participants from Norway and Japan). The results of the
small group discussions were collected on cards and
displayed on a flipchart. We document them here because we believe that some of the ideas may be worth
following up.
General
Include UCP in peace & conflict studies
Have a college course on UCP (a course syllabus exists)
Bring the concepts to the universities for example as a seminar
Spread info on UCP by lectures,YouTube, seminars, organize a webinar
Facebook group: international and nationals
Open NP-Homepage for the public with good inform
Movements

NGOs

Teach your kids non-violence

Be pro-actively non-violent
Challenge the belief system 'violence as last means', discuss it in the churches
Linking Japan's constitutional peace provision (Article 9) with UCP
Presentations for (local) political parties

Give yourself a UCP-mandate

Push German politics to give more money to Civil Peace Service /
Convince German Red Cross to promote UCP
Convince people by storytelling: tell them about your successes as specific as possible
Organize field trips for Members of the Parliament and invite them to visit NP projects in
the field
What can we do in Germany?

Meetings with Members of Parliament

UCP-Trainings fr interested refugees
Create an accessible database of information and get more research undertaken
Inform members of peace organizations about this topic
Invite experts on UCP to tell about their work at your local peace group/church/school
Protection and accompaniment for refugees in Germany (women, minorities)
Short stories on flyer with contact and sponsor info
Teaching materials for schools and peace rallies
Disarm national states, following the example of Costa Rica
Talks/presentations on UCP
Individual

Report on my Facebook profile site

Talk with our friends, families, at the job about this topic

34

6. Outlook

Stephan Bres
The symposium in Bonn gave us an introductory as well as a deepening view on the possibilities
(and limits) of Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping (UCP).
In her presentation Rachel Julian asked whether UCP is something new and an alternative to the
usual view on conflicts and conflict transformation. She developed her answer by referring to the
practicability of the concept. There is of course a theoretical background, but in the end the concept unfolds in the conflict zones, in the active and pro-active dealing with people living and trying to survive there and facing all forms of violence. The concept contains the analysis of conflict,
building up of relations with all actors, the protection and support of civilians and especially the
idea that civilians are actors themselves, owners of their own protection. The aim of UCP is to develop a network in the communities that confronts perpetrators, offers protection and if prevention fails contains and transforms escalated conflicts by offering mediation.
The peace workers of the international UCP organisations monitor, accompany civilians, offer
trainings, mediate in escalated conflicts and support network building. This also means that they
are constantly living with the people in conflict zones and do not like other organisations - just
visit occasionally them from the outside.
From Rachel Julian' presentation we learned how many international organisations are active in
protecting civilians even if they do not call it UCP but for example protective accompaniment or
pro-active presence. There are differences in the focus of their work but also in the selfconception, e.g. if they see themselves as a non-partisan or as a solidarity organisation (however,
the borderlines are fluid.)
Several of the organisations using UCP have direct or indirect contacts in Germany: Peace Brigades International, Ecumenical Accompaniment Program for Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), Christian Peacemakers Team (CPT), Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation
(FOR). Some of these were participants in an event the BSV organized during the Protestant Days
2015 in Stuttgart, and some of them are active in the working group on UCP that the BSV has
initiated to expand the knowledge on UCP in society and politics. It is important that these organisations cooperate and exchange and pass on their experiences. Only by cooperation and information on concrete examples from conflict regions we can challenge the idea that only violence
can stop violence.
A second aspect that was mentioned in the symposium in Bonn is advocacy work with the United
Nations and the European Union. Mel Duncan and Rolf Carriere have presented the successes and
challenges of their advocacy work for Nonviolent Peaceforce with the UN. It is positive that countries like Costa Rica, Benin, Belgium and especially the Philippines who count on their own experiences with UCP in the International Monitoring Team in Mindanao, have been actively promoting
the idea of ICP.
The training on UCP that the UN Training Facility UNITAR offers as an on-line course and the active
support and sponsoring of projects by UNICEF, UNHCR or UNDP are big successes.
Nevertheless: At the level of the UN Security Council and also many national governments at best
acknowledge the existence of UCP but do not consider it as a serious alternative to military
peacekeeping. The idea to use nonviolent means for countering violent actors is as Rolf Carriere
said counter-intuitive. Also, there is a lack of scientific studies that prove the efficiency of UCP
(researchers like Rachel Julian are trying to change this).
Other challenges that Carriere and Duncan listed are the questions of accountability and mandates of non-governmental organisations, doubts that civilian personnel would be as safe (or even

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safer) than soldiers in conflict zones and the basic belief in the power of the military. Also the culture of violence and the arms trade fuelling it must not be neglected.
The EU itself has not only supported projects of Nonviolent Peaceforce in the Philippines and recently in Syria/Lebanon, it also sends itself unarmed missions to some places like Georgia, Aceh
(Indonesia) or DR Congo.
However as Alessandro Rossi pointed out the EU is bound by short-term project circles and
political agenda-settings that contradict the long-term oriented concept of UCP. The EU has a
closed bureaucratic mentality which makes the necessary coordination between actors along its
own hierarchical structures as well as horizontal coordination between different actors difficult,
perhaps even impossible. You cannot build up a local protection mechanism on a drafting board
on a fixed timeline measured in months.
How can we overcome these obstacles? Building relations, passing on the experiences from the
conflict regions and talking in many tedious meetings with those who do not agree with us. Rolf
Carrriere advised us: follow up, follow up, follow up.
Oliver Knabe, director of forumZFD, another organisation that with focus of peace building is
intervening nonviolently in conflict regions, considered the following tasks:
We need to inform the public about the opportunities of UCP and the peace work, and we need
to reach key people. And in order to reach key people we have to address topics that are important for them, for example currently the issue of refugees.
Something similar said German MP Dr. Ute Finckh-Krmer during our seminar 2014 in Berlin,
when she gave some advices on a successful appeal towards her colleagues in the German Parliament (Bundestag).
Concerning the continuation of the campaign on UCP, the seminar has not only clarified different
aspects of the concept, but also offered much advice on how those institutions think that we
want to lobby, and which internal 'compulsions' or regulations are the bases of their action (or
they think that these must be their bases).
In the same time, this documentation itself is, so we hope, a repository for all those who are interested in nonviolent intervention in conflicts in general and UCP specifically.

Stephan Bres is co-chair of the BSV.

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